Artists

Troika

Press release

max goelitz is pleased to present new works from recent series by Troika that explore the interplay between analog and digital realities. In the paintings from the new series To Find What You Are Not Looking For, Troika draws on historical landscape photographs originally used for the documentation and surveying of territories. Troika translates these images into a painterly process based on the Gabor wavelet transformation — a mathematical filter function that breaks images down into wave-like patterns, lines, and textures, used in image analysis, signal processing, and iris recognition. With Ghost Specimen, Troika turns its attention to historical herbarium collections. Plants, including species that are now extinct, are translated into small 3D-printed metal sculptures through AI-assisted image interpretation. Installed with the flower facing the wall, the sculptures reveal the reverse side that was absent from the original dataset and therefore had to be supplemented, estimated, and speculatively reconstructed by the AI system. The plant emerges not as an exact replica, but as a fragile form situated between biological document, memory object, and algorithmic distortion. In the further new series Arrivals without Coordinates, Troika combines historical photographic techniques with questions of ecology, spatial orientation, and technologically generated imagery. The works draw on early hand-coloring techniques in which black-and-white photographs were enhanced with transparent layers of color. In Troika's practice, this process is interwoven with generative image-making, cartographic references, and analog source material. The series presents plants situated in landscapes and climate zones to which they cannot be geographically assigned with certainty. Each plant appears as an autonomous presence, detached from fixed coordinates and familiar systems of origin, location, and habitat. Their appearance seems at once plausible and improbable, contemporary and speculative. The sale of the work series is supporting the publication of Troika's forthcoming book Third Nature. Conceived as an interdisciplinary volume bringing together leading international writers, curators, and artists, the publication expands Troika's exploration of the increasingly complex relationship between technology, ecology, and human perception. In parallel, James Turrell's Elliptical Glass First Cause remains on view through 25 July.